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Tuesday, 26 June 2007

Materials design for Virtual Worlds

I was recently lucky enough to be invited to give a presentation on course and materials design for Second Life at the SLanguages 2007 virtual conference (June 23rd 2007) which took place on the Edunation Island in Second life. The conference itself was a fascinating event and the experience of presenting a conference paper within a virtual world to an audience of avatars was certainly a new and novel one for me.

I was asked to give this presentation because I have been working over the last few months on designing a Business English course for Second Life. As part of putting together the presentation I came up with a list of lessons I’ve learnt while going through the process of designing the course. The list is by no means finalised and I’m sure it will continue to grow and change as I learn more about developing materials for this world, but I thought I’d publish it here for anyone who is interested in designing their own materials for language teaching in SL.

So here is my list of things to think about if you are trying to design teaching materials for Second Life. Feel free to leave comments.

Tips for language learning materials design in Second Life

1. Design outside the classroom box and into the computer game boxThink about the kinds of common computer game genre. They are really quite limited. The main ones are things like

Driving or flying games (Grand Prix racing etc)

Shooter games (Kill everything in sight etc.)

Sports type games ( Football, Golf etc.)

Strategy type games ( Zoo Tycoon, Hotel Tycoon etc.)

Sims type games (The Sims, Sims 2 Pets etc.)

Think about how these can be made collaborative and why students playing them might need to communicate. Admittedly, it’s much easier to produce these types of games if you have an island and a team of technicians to work on them for you. If you haven’t there are still plenty of things you can do using places and objects already built in world. If you get your students to go to Nissan Altima Island they can pick up there own car, which they can either use there or anywhere else to have a driving competition. On AOL Pointe they can get their own skateboard and a collection of tricks to do on it. There are numerous places to play just about any sport you can think of. Finding and learning how to use these objects and places could be a communicative task in itself.

2. Build in ownership of the environmentIf you have your own Island why not build a student area of some kind. Somewhere they can post their own materials, pictures etc. or give them their own room to decorate.

3. Give students control of their learning / activitiesWhen you design learning tasks like role-plays let students be themselves, don’t try too hard to orchestrate things like what they will do, where they will be or what they will say. Good role-play is like jazz improvisation, you provide a structure and students improvise within it.

4. Make learning and task goals clear to studentsSounds obvious, but when we know why they are doing things we often take it foregranted that students know. This often isn’t the case, so be sure to let your students know why you want them to do something and what you think they should be achieving.

5. Make sure that students get individualised feedback on their performanceEspecially in virtual world activities where students are in reality quite isolated and really sitting at home on a computer alone, it’s very important that they get some feedback on their performance and know how they are doing. Keeping note cards at the ready while you are monitoring your students can be really handy for making notes to pass to them at the end of the lesson.

6. Maximise student to student interactionNow that Second life is going to have voice communication for everyone, there is no excuse for the activities to be tutor led. Let the students work together. Be sure to explore the voice capabilities and look at how you can group and pair students for voice chat.

7. Breakdown texts into smaller chunks and make ‘input’ tasks collaborative.SL isn’t a text driven environment and doesn’t really lend itself to reading long texts. It’s much better to divide your texts up by giving a small chunk to each student on a note card, and then get them to reconstruct the overall meaning collaboratively.

8. Make the activities engaging on a mental (cognitive), personal and a cultural levelSL offers us the opportunity to connect people from all around the world, so be sure that your tasks and activities draw on that international experience and exploit the unique experiences that each student brings from their culture.

9. Build the materials into the immediate SL environmentSL is a wonderfully rich graphic environment. Try to make sure your materials exploit that immediate environment. Get students doing things in different places and moving around. Don’t just try to recreate a classroom in SL, remember the most successful language learning that happens goes on outside the classroom.

10. Make tasks relevant to real life and real SL lifeThe borders between real life and SL are becoming increasingly blurred. Think about how virtual 3D worlds will become integrated into our everyday lives and the kinds of skills people will need to operate and communicate in them effectively.

11. Exploit the ‘authentic’ SL worldThere are lots of interesting and novel things to do and places to go in SL, so why not exploit them and design activities around them? Get students to go out in groups and explore and create reports, plan trips and tours for each other, bring back experiences to share with other class members.

12. Exploit the SL user interfaceThe SL user interface is an incredibly useful tool and has lots of features that can be used creatively. The snapshot tool can help students to create magazine reports with wonderful graphics or a photo diary of their experiences. The movie tool can help students to create machinima. They can use it to create their own video interviews, advertisements, or record role plays or drama productions.

13. Train learners to exploit the SL user interface / develop good IT literacy / study skills.The user interface can also be used more or less effectively as a study tool, to take notes make records or to share information. Make sure that you train students to use it effectively, so that it aids rather than obstructs their study.

14. Build in social interactionKnowledge is socially constructed and language is a social function. Try to design social time and space into your course and your tasks.

15. Create and exploit information gapsMake sure that you create the need to communicate within your tasks. Creating information gap type activities is relatively easy in SL as you have a lot of control about how and who you give information to.

16. Develop and exploit the students’ relationship to their avatarThe SL avatar that represents your student can become a vehicle for the expression of their personality. Think about how you can involve this relationship between student and avatar in your activities.

If you are a teacher and you are interested in developing language teaching materials for Second Life or doing some language teaching there get in touch with The consultants-eas they are now running seminars and training sessions in SL.

9 comments:

Interesting article that really gave me, as a non-SL user, an insight into what it's like to try and build an educational environment there.

However, I'm a bit frustrated that, as part of researching whether it's worth me going to the hassle of getting set up in SL, I find that many resources, such as your video/audio transcripts are only available by... getting set up in SL!

I can understand your frustration, but there is an awful lot of information flying around about SL outside of the environment itself. If you go to youtube and search for SL you'll find loads of videos, you can find podcasts and video casts in i-tunes or you could actually join and set yourself up an avatar for free and have a look around. In the end I think it's something you have to try out for yourslef.

Nik, This is just the sort of information I have been after. Great ideas for setting up the virtual classroom. I also like how you endorse the use of games within the world. I haven't looked at everything, but what I see at first glance is great! I have you bookmarked!

Thanks for the replies and I do appreciate the pressures of workload (do I ever appreciate the pressures of workload!) that make it hard to make information available in multiple formats.

I also know there is a lot of general info on SL outside the environment itself, although there is less specifically on educational issues, which is why I valued Nik's post so much.

I just wanted to raise your awareness of this, because when you say "go into" or "join" SL, this would require the purchase of a new computer plus a (I imagine) non-trivial time investment to create an avatar and learn the game mechanics on my part. I'm going to have to be very very convinced that SL is the way forward for online langauage learning to do that!

Anyway, as I said in my previous comment, thanks for the excellent article.

I sympathise. Buying a new computer is quite a big step and getting one that can easily handle Second Life means quite an additional financial commitment. I think this is more of an issue than the time aspect, as it doesn't really take so much time to set up an avatar etc, and it's quite fun (if you enjoy that kind of thing).

As for the computer, I think that so much of the web is going to start becoming 3D and much more graphically demanding, that unless you upgrade there are likely to be quite a few things that you are excluded from (not just SL). I was in similar position just before New Year and was increasingly feeling that I was becoming a victim of the digital divide! I certainly haven't ever regretted upgrading a computer and it has opened up so many more things than just SL, and as it is much faster than my old one, it also saves me a bit of time(and that always comes in handy). Anyway, I can understand your reluctance, as there is also a lot of hype and misinformation about SL and its relative virtues (or lack of). In the end though upgrading and getting in there is the only way to find out for sure, but perhaps even if SL doesn't meet your expectations, at least you will be wiser for it.

Hi Nik!I'm a teacher of English from Russia. I'm doing my MA assignemnt on using Technology in ELT..this theme is difficult for me, I am not very much commited to using the Internet. BUT I feel this is the future. What do you suggest I start with?

Good places to start getting involved are: http://webheadsinaction.org/ A great group of educators sharing experience of learning technology. You could also check out my Web 2.0 tools for teachers wall at: http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/teachersweb20

Or try some of my daily English Activities with your students: http://daily-english-activities.blogspot.com/